I always love reading blogs about other investors’ investment income. Watching other people’s investment income rise is my second favorite thing (the only thing better is watching MY investment income rise!)
Here is our investment income for October, 2019. This report includes income from dividends, interest, mutual funds, and rental properties.
Overview
October was a great month. I had a week long business trip to Barcelona. If you’ve never been I highly recommend you go. It’s a fantastic city with fantastic food and amazing architecture I thoroughly enjoyed my time there.
And, of course, at the end of the month we had Halloween, which is a lot of fun when you have 2 little kids at home. The kids loved making Jack-o-lanterns – scooping out the “pumpkin guts” and cutting out the faces.
My wife asked the kids what they wanted to be for Halloween and then made their costumes. My son wanted to be a black and white owl and my daughter wanted to be a “girl lion”.
My wife even threaded fairy lights through my daughter’s lion tail so that it would light up at night.
Without further ado, here’s what our investment income looked like for the month:
Dividend & Interest Income
Total dividend income for the month was $2,795.35. This is up 28.7% from last October’s total of $1,617.28. That increase is primarily due to increased investments in Philip Morris and Altria.
Our cumulative year-to-date dividends are up 15% from last year. The first month of a quarter is always our worst from a dividend perspective, so it’s nice to be able to compare to the same month last year.
It’s hard to be anything other than pleased with this. All of my planning has assumed 10% annual growth, so this is a nice surprise. I expect that we’ll end the year at around this level.
Overall, a solid month.
Rental income
This category includes net income from the 6 rental properties that my wife and I own, plus 50% of the income from 4 rental properties that we own with my mom. This number does not include appreciation of the properties or the decrease in the mortgage balance (those numbers show up in the net worth report).
However, this income is net of all mortgage, tax, and insurance payments. That is, this is a true cash flow report for our rental properties.
October was a poor month for our rental income. We needed to pay the property taxes for the one property that we own free and clear (which means there’s no escrow account to pay property taxes). Total rental income for the month was $714.13.
Our rental income is up 264% compared to the same period last year. The properties are performing better than last year and we have more of them.
I’m feeling very good about our decision to deploy some of our cash into rental properties earlier this year. I think that when the inevitable stock market correction comes we’re going to love taking our higher rental income and using it to purchase stocks that are on sale.
Total investment income this month
Total (dividend + rental) income = $2,795.35
It is just fantastic to see our passive income continue its upwards march.
In terms of total cumulative income through October, we are up 39% from this point last year, and this percentage increase has been relatively stable over the last 6 months.
Looking at our trailing 12-month total income, you can see that our passive income has been doing exactly what we want it to do – it’s been trending up and to the right.
My goal for the year is to generate $85,000 in passive income, and we are currently on pace to exceed that number. In fact, the actual passive income received over the last 12 months was $89,977.48. I expect our actual total passive income for 2019 will be just over $90,000.
Changes
No changes
Recap
October was a good month. Our passive income was good, our rental income was ok, and we appear to be very much on track to hit our yearly passive income goal.
How did everybody else do with their investment income this month?
Are there any investments out there trading at reasonable valuations that I should be looking at?
Great job- hard to guess if we will have another buying opportunity or if one should just invest it now because any decrease is likely to be small and short.
Yeah, I’ve been struggling with that question for a few years now. The answer I keep returning to is that although I don’t know what future returns will look like, I do know that the stock market is historically overvalued by a number of metrics, and investing when the market is overvalued has almost always lead to subpar returns.
Hello Again!
Do you reinvest (DRIP) your dividends?
I have DRIP set on a case-by-case basis. For most of my stocks I don’t DRIP right now, but there are a few stocks that I feel are at least reasonably valued right now (PM, MO, for example) and I have those set to DRIP.
Thanks for the response.
Can you share which stocks from your portfolio do you consider that are at a reasonable price right now? Besides from PM and MO.
I know the valuation of the stock market right now is high.
Thanks!